Nelson-Wiggen Style 6 OrchestrionDiscs I and IIfrom the Yaffe Collection

The Style 6 was Nelson-Wiggen's most elaborate cabinet-style (keyboardless) orchestrion, and it includes piano, mandolin attachment, xylophone, snare drum, bass drum with tympani effect, cymbal, wood block, tambourine, castanets and triangle. The instrumentation is comparable to that of the popular Seeburg KT Special, but with a more subtle single-stroke xylophone in place of Seeburg's reiterating version.

Oscar Nelson and Peter Wiggen had been engineers and factory supervisors for the J.P. Seeburg Piano Company since its beginning in 1907. They quit working for Seeburg in the early 1920s and opened the Nelson-Wiggen Piano Company in 1922, offering their own line of coin pianos and orchestrions, most of which played styles A and 4X rolls. The 4X roll was similar to the earlier style G roll used by several models of Seeburg orchestrions, but the music was specially arranged for single-stroke xylophones with many short holes playing arpeggios and quickly repeated notes in the style of a human xylophone player, in contrast to the longer holes that played sustained notes on the pipes in earlier Seeburg orchestrions. Late-era Automatic G rolls also incorporated the xylophone arrangements.

The Style 6 is quite rare, having not been introduced to the market until 1926, just a few years before the end of the automatic music era. Only a dozen or so are known to exist. It has separate suction regulators for the piano, xylophone and drums, allowing the loudness of each instrument to be adjusted relative to the others. The rolls played on these recordings here were made during the era in which the Nelson-Wiggen 6 was made, with the exception of G-746, which predates it by one year. The music is presented here in chronological order, to demonstrate how it evolved from the mid-1920s into the early 1930s.

Provenance of this Nelson-Wiggen Style 6 Orchestrion is as follows

Late 1920s-late 1940s or early 1950s: originally used in the Syracuse, New York area.

Late 1940s-mid 1950s: It is possible that it went through the hands of Art Sanders at the Musical Museum in Deansboro, New
York.

Mid or late1950s: Horn's Cars of Yesterday, Sarasota, Florida.

1965: Walt Bellm acquired the museum and changed its name to Bellm's Cars of Yesterday. During Horn's or Bellm's ownership, Don MacDonald put it into playing condition, and it was displayed until 1986.

September, 1986: Jasper Sanfilippo, Barrington Hills, Illinois, bought it at Bellm's annual auction. Jasper switched the stained glass from this #6 to his other example, acquired from Bill Allen, and installed its original curtains in this one.

1987: Art Reblitz, Colorado Springs.

2004: Restored by Reblitz Restorations and sold to Mark Yaffe, Tampa, Florida.